In June of 2007, 7 friends left the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia on a trip to Nepal. Our mission was to deliver a painting of an amazing man in a remote village which sits at 12,000 feet in the Himalayas. The film that documents this cultural exchange is now finished, and in the summer of 2010, it was carried back to Nepal and shown there. The film premiered in the US on September 16 at the Taubman Museum in Roanoke before beginning a new journey around the country.

Upcoming Shows

We've been named as a official selection in the Southern Circuit of Filmmakers Tour, March 17-24.Shows are in Hapeville, GA 3/17, Madison, GA 3/20, Orangeburg, SC 3/22, Gainsville, GA 3/23, and Manteo, NC 3/24.Learn more by going to the SouthArts blog.

View the theatrical trailer for A Gift for the Village

Monday, July 9, 2007

Part II about Jomsom, being posted from Kagbeni by Jane. Shops in Jomsom town are closet-sized, displaying a few imported tubes of toothpaste, post cards, bottled water, practical hardware for kerosene lamps and gas cookers, and kitchenware, a few covered pans and a few drinking glasses. Then there is the tailor, the barber, the launderer, the aorline ticket office for conforming tickets on the tiny planes that come in when the winds are not too harch, and the little stone rooms constituting the schools, where we have been fortunate to visit and film and meet wonderful teachers. A few motorcycles now beep down the cobbled street each day--Tsampa's is the newest and most handsome, flown in a few months ago, a gorgeous candy-apple red concoction. Jenna noted that the last6 time we were here, at duck, just outside the windows of The Dancing Yak, Tsampa would be curry-combing his horse, but today, he is mostly wiping won his red cycle. These motorcyles sometimes carry two stoic men, and sometimes a stoic man driving a stoic but peacock-appareled woman. Once a day, aan Indian-built Mahindra jeep may blare through town, a completely new and incongruous piece of smelly progress, made to seat six, but overstuffed each time with fifteen passngers and their sacks and boxes. But the cows, the bony mules, aand the off-duty horses still wander down the street, ears and bottom lips loose and limp, gait based on the model of very slow Wordsworthian clouds.

Seven years ago, Jomsom's airstip was not paved; neither was its road cobbled. Electricity was rare, and every night was measured by a single pale candle. Heliocopters would not fly routinely overhead with passengers to going to holu Mukhtinath. Only the stars, the planets, rainblows, and a few highly adept Tibetan lamas could hold the skies for so long.

The natural structures which rise precipitously behind the buildings of Jomsom are larger than hills buyt not quite correctly mountains, on several counts. For one thing, they look like petrified blonde lava, tracheal floes of rock punctuated by small dark caves out of which it would be thinkable for pterydactyls to emerge. If this were New Mexico, the green spots would be pinon, but her, the few scrub plants are a ground juniper, an almost nauseatingly pungent variety of sage, and a few other small-blooming ground herbs, along with the valuable but prickly seabuckthorn bushes with their treaured vitamin-rich hips. These geologic mountain-like things rising just yards from us seem like a giant herd of fossilized rhinoceruses, with their great heads and horns bent down and lost under ground, hard, impenetrable, fixed in this bowed posture for all time. But as the rain stops, the rocks seem to soften and turn to animal hide, half-returning the stone to life. Water has this power in Jomsom and along the route to the Tibetan steppe=lands: to reverse death, to disguise age, to clear the dry air of hot dangers, and to find the river, which in turn finds the dark fieds, which find the July markets here in Jomsom, in the phantasmagoric shapes of green beans, cauliflowers, beets, carrots, cabbages, greens, onions, and potatoes.

And, just above town, above everything I have described, even above tne soon-to-be-built Nepal Telecommunications mobile tower and the enrmous scars which will be necessary to bolt this tower onto one of these mountains, sits the perfect=postured Nilgiri, the eight=tallest peak in the world, and, just to the other side of town, there is the tip of Dhaulagiri, the fifth-tallest. Pure white snow, the grandmothers of rivers. In this town, the painting now hangs, and we are honored to be here to live in the presence of our village friends for a few days, enjoying the thousand meals that Tsampa's indomitable wife Karma always prepares for us. Tashi Deleg to all of our friends. Finally, dear Emerson, thank you for taking care of so many things at the house for me--please keep writing, since you are my favorite gothic storyteller in the world; and Barbara and Jessica, huge thanks to you for managing the hearts, litterboxes, and stomachs of all my many beloved cats--your own hearts are dear to me; and Iris, oceans of love and good luck and tashi deleg for your MCATs on July 13th. I am so proud of you and Emerson and all our friends. Love, Jane